Abstract

Arthur Schopenhauer (born 1788 in Danzig, died 1860 in Frankfurt am Main), was the son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, a wealthy merchant, and Johanna Trosiener, who was later to become a well‐known member of Goethe's circle in Weimar and, subsequently, a popular novelist whose collected works, published in 1831, filled twenty‐four volumes. The death of his father (a probable suicide) in 1805 led to the future philosopher's ultimate abandonment of the plan that he should enter business. After further study, he attended the University of Göttingen in 1809 where he studied with G. E. Schulze, whose Aenisidisumus (1796), with its critique of Kant's conception of the thing‐in‐itself, had played a crucial role in the early development of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. It was through Schulze that he became acquainted, not only with Kant, but with Plato and Schelling (see Hübscher 1989, pp. 159ff). The connection between Plato and Kant, a crucial thesis of his philosophy as a whole, is the subject of some of his earliest and most penetrating notebook entries (Schopenhauer 1988, vol. I, nos 17, 228, 442). Schopenhauer left Göttingen for Berlin to attend Fichte's lectures. Despite apparently serious attempts, testified by his voluminous notebooks (preserved in Schopenhauer 1988, vol. II), Schopenhauer found himself deeply out of sympathy with the Fichtean philosophy of reflection, and his distaste for German idealism, which only increased with the years, dates from this encounter. On the heels of Napoleon's invasion of Berlin, Schopenhauer retired to a small town outside of Weimar, where (June‐November 1813) he wrote his dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, whose simplification and transformation of the Kantian doctrine of the concepts of the understanding into a third “form of intuition” next to space and time forms the basis of his distinctive epistemology and its difference from Kant's. (This difference is most clearly expressed in §21; see also the “Critique of Kantian Philosophy”, the Appendix to The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, pp. 437–451). The “ideality of sensation” is the theme of On Vision and Colors, written in 1815 under the influence of his encounter with Goethe's Farbenlehre (a sympathy not reciprocated by Goethe for the younger man's contribution). At this time, Schopenhauer moved to Dresden, where for four years he worked out The World as Will and Representation in intellectual isolation. In addition to the dual influence of Plato and Kant, Schopenhauer had also been introduced to doctrines of Eastern religion by F. Meyer in Weimar (1813), and is often said to be the first Western philosopher seriously to incorporate Eastern thought into his system (see Schopenhauer 1988, vol. I, no. 564). The “work” is announced in a note that is even earlier, from 1813, which begins.